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Topic: A Movie Forum Named After Stan (Read 15747 times)

This board isn't reserved for discussion of Stanley Kubrick exclusively.

It is a board for discussing film, television and even the books they are based on.

We live in a matrix. There are things that we all believe. A good example is Daylight Savings Time. Twice a year everyone in the US and most other nations, move their clock one hour, either forward or back. Everyone. That is active participation in Matrix Management. Supporting the "reality" of the modern world.

The same can be said of money.

But, recently, those of us who have "woke up" recognize that our neighbors and friends and family hold similar beliefs that turn out to be based on lies. Consider the pervasiveness of the belief in Global Warming being caused by man. Why do people believe it? Because it is on television, radio, newsprint, novels and even movies...Waterworld?

Popular culture. Since the 1940's film has been the driving force behind what is popular. Whether it was on television or at the theaters, video has surpassed the written literature in influencing the masses. That's why we have Stan's Forum.

Don't limit yourself just to Kubrick. He certainly left us a huge puzzle to piece together with his body of work and it's individual pieces, but there are others with similar influence doing many of the same things and telling some of the same stories.

So, let's figure it out. What do they want us to believe and how do they program us to believe it?

Viper

Self-portrait of Kubrick with a Leica III camera, when he worked for Look (from the book Drama and Shadows).

Stanley Kubrick (July 26, 1928 – March 7, 1999) was an American director, writer, producer, and photographer of films, who lived in England during most of the last 40 years of his career. Kubrick was noted for the scrupulous care with which he chose his subjects, his slow method of working, the variety of genres he worked in, his technical perfectionism and his reclusiveness about his films and personal life. He worked far beyond the confines of the Hollywood system, maintaining almost complete artistic control and making movies according to the whims and time constraints of no one but himself, but with the rare advantage of big-studio financial support for all his endeavors. Nominated several times for Oscars for both writing and directing, his only personal win was for the special effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey, though his films have won many Oscars and other awards in other categories.

Kubrick is widely acknowledged as one of the most accomplished, innovative and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. He directed a number of highly acclaimed and often controversial films that have often been perceived as a reflection of his obsessive and perfectionist nature. His films are characterized by a formal visual style and meticulous attention to detail – often with elements of surrealism and expressionism eschewing structured linear narrative. While often viewed as expressing an ironic pessimism, a few critics feel his films containt a cautious optimism when viewed more carefully. His works are noted as some of the "most original, provocative, and visionary motion pictures ever made"

Stanley Kubrick was a Look magazine photographer when he caught himself in the mirror of Rosemary Williams, a showgirl, in 1949. Kubrick's history in photography would later greatly influence his film directing.

Although film noir had peaked in the 1940s, both the plot and cinematography of The Killing strongly evoked that genre, and it is now regarded as one of the best of that kind. Note the use of shadows and cigarette smoke; note also the resemblance of the mask to those used in A Clockwork Orange.

Long before it became film fashion after the Vietnam era, Kubrick portrayed war as brutal, using stark black-and-white images in Paths of Glory.

While Douglas and Kubrick worked on Paths of Glory, Kubrick was both the film's director and executive producer. But on Spartacus, Douglas, in addition to being lead actor, was executive producer, making Kubrick's directorial role subordinate. They meshed well on the first film, but Spartacus severed their earlier bond.

Lolita was one of most controversial novels of the century, given its theme. Here, Lolita kisses her stepfather Humbert goodnight while he plays chess with her mother (Shelley Winters). Any kind of overt sexual content had to be toned down significantly for Kubrick's film adaptation, and most of the sexual acts between its title character and Humbert are only hinted at.

Many viewers of Dr. Strangelove did not initially realize that Kubrick had cast Peter Sellers in three roles, all with distinctively different appearances and accents.

2001 is the first of many Kubrick films to use an all-classical score. Kubrick's famed opening shot of the Sun, Earth and Moon is one of several accompanied by Richard Strauss's majestic fanfarelike Also sprach Zarathustra. Space flight is accompanied by Johann Strauss's graceful The Blue Danube, and all appearances of the monolith are accompanied by the unearthly modernistic Requiem by György Ligeti.

In A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick continued his innovative use of classical music begun in 2001: A Space Odyssey. However, instead of accompanying graceful space flight, the music accompanied violence and rape. The slow-motion fight scene about to commence is choreographed to Rossini's overture to "The Thieving Magpie."

Special lenses were developed for Barry Lyndon to allow filming using only natural light.

Kubrick's film was the second to make notably innovative use of the Steadicam, which can track motion smoothly without a dolly track.

Reviewers noted that unlike most Vietnam War films set in lush jungle environments, Kubrick made a mainly urban Vietnam film set around bombed-out buildings, giving this war film a more distinctively grim and bleak quality.

The casting of real-life celebrity couple Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise as a married couple in a film rumored (correctly) to have a sexually charged plot fueled wild speculations about the film's content.